I Kill Monsters: The Revenants (Book 2) (17 page)

Above all dangled the fact that my master
himself faced impending senectitude. Vinci wished to repair to a
quiet resort for the last of his days. No doubt he desired my
companionship in his final years, for both my company and my
service. But though in appearance I was still a child, the fact was
that by that time I had walked this earth nearly a hundred and
thirty years. I was no one’s
boy
, much less servant, and
would never agree to be treated so. Further, I could not accompany
him to some unknown clime, not when the object of my desire was
rooted here. Such my heart would never allow.

Ah, my love, Elizaveta. Four years passed,
and she did not return. Vinci came, and stayed, concerning himself
with his affairs. The fourth year of her absence gave to the fifth.
Then six and seven, and yet another. Finally a full decade.

I had never forgotten her. Many was the night
I would perch myself on her grandmother’s mansion, gazing down
longingly, imaging her walking the grounds. I went to the old
woman, perhaps more often than I should. In her dementia she was
convinced I was her late husband, whom—I remembered Elizaveta
recounting—she had met as a child. The pathetic woman would hug me
to her withered bosom as I fed from her, calling me by her dead
husband’s name. For near on a decade I drank from her, my tenuous
tie to the one I loved.

Elizaveta returned to Petersburg after ten
years. That first night I watched her move back into her
grandmother’s house, attended by the old woman’s servants. She came
in a fancy coach with a man and three little children in tow, each
of whom looked much like her. I presumed the man her husband. She
had left me a young woman and reappeared a lady. What was only
hinted at in her youth was here before my eyes fully realized: her
allure and comeliness, the elegance and style of her dress, the
grace of each move.

As she looked towards my position I hid from
her view. As I have said, ten years to one such as me is naught,
but to her…I watched the way she doted on the children as she
ushered them into the house, taking the youngest up into her arms.
And I feared she had stopped loving me. Perhaps it will amuse you
to hear, but I returned to my own abode then, long before the
encroachment of day, and I worked up my nerve to approach her. Her!
The one I considered each day in her absence converting, allowing
her to join me as a child of the night. The one to whom I had sworn
my undying love. And she to me.

I went to her on the second night, finding
her alone in her gardens, staring into the sky. Any fears I
harbored were immediately assuaged as she came into my arms. Her
ardor for my being had never diminished. Time had cemented her love
for me, even as—pressured by society and her parents—she had taken
a husband and bore his children.

We resumed our relationship as if the past
years had not interrupted. Nights she would steal from the house,
joining me in the park, on the Neva. I chose not to take her to my
home quite yet, as Vinci’s presence would require some explanation.
We lay together those nights, under the stars, and knew each other
as man and woman, though to any who saw us hand in hand in the city
dark I appeared her child and she my mother.

By the fourth months her stomach had begun to
show with our child.
Our
child
! Imagine my joy. Even
then I had little knowledge of my species and knew not that my kind
and hers could produce offspring. Vinci had protected me and taken
me into his tutelage, as I have explained, yet there were gaps in
my education.

We began to make plans for our future at
once. Elizaveta would join me in the long night, a vampire. She
would become the first human being I turned. Though I appeared but
a child, I was a fully mature member of my species. Of course there
was the question of Elizaveta’s husband and their children, a minor
obstacle for two enamored of each other such as we. And of course I
grasped the solution to this conundrum, yet I thought it best not
to force the answer upon her as yet. Let her come to it in due
time. Better, in fact, that she recommend it to me.

I asked her of her children and she told me
of them, their names and personality traits. Her face gleamed and
her voice lilted as she did so. However, as she continued to speak,
her tone grew more controlled, her expression less animated, until
finally she spoke of them as if they were strangers. She must have
recognized then they were all—nominal husband and children—a
distraction of the decade separating us. The conversation of what
should be done with her children and husband came up once, abruptly
faltering. Neither of us spoke to it, for we both knew what needed
to be done.

I was at the height of my appetites then, but
I could never feed off Elizaveta as I so longed. Doing so would
kill her. I continued to find victims along the quay, in the back
alleys, and outside taverns. I even stole into Elizaveta’s quarters
and continued to feed off the grandmother. The husband—whom up to
this point I had dismissed as of little or no concern—grew much
disturbed with his in-law’s physical state as she quickly
deteriorated. Elizaveta remarked of this one night in my arms, and
I thought nothing of it, content to draw my finger across her
protruding stomach, tracing the life that grew there. Imagine my
surprise the following evening when I returned to the estate to
find the grandmother’s room strewn with garlic and crucifixes, the
windows barred to me.

Against my better judgment, I confided in
Vinci. Even then, I did so diffidently, not convinced of the
judiciousness of my action. Vinci’s nature was not to cosset—though
he did wish my accompaniment in his impending departure for just
that purpose. He heard me out, his expression stoic, seemingly
disinterested.

So
it
has
come
to
pass
, he remarked when I had bared my soul or as
much of it to him as I would allow.
Rainford
in
love
.

He said it as if bored.

His gaze betrayed nothing, not even the
slightest interest. It was only later that I came to recognize his
seeming impassivity in regards to the matter as imperiousness. He
listened, yet offered no advice, remarking only that loss is the
greatest teacher, in that it determines value. His words were
meaningless to me at the time. I thought then he spoke of his own
dwindling years, of past loves denied and taken from him. Of my
love, as later events would bear out, Vinci did not approve. Such
was the nature of my education.

Elizaveta reported that her husband had taken
to acting suspiciously about her, that she knew he was keeping
things from her. I pressed her for examples, for details. He had
begun a correspondence with foreign parties, she explained,
secreting the missives from her. Aside from this quirk, he doted on
her as he had in the past, and spoke hopefully of the child in her
womb—the fool convinced it was his own. I assured Elizaveta she had
nothing of which to worry, that our time together was fast
approaching. The protections adorning the grandmother’s bed chamber
spoke to his suspicions, and any queer behavior she detected on the
part of her husband towards her stemmed from this. So I believed,
and so I persuaded her. We spoke of the life developing in her
stomach, of the family we would make together.

Into these propitious circumstances a third
figure from my past let himself be known. My brother, Viktor,
thought to me long lost. I had not seen him since we were boys,
since the final flight from our village. And I was still very much
a boy to all outward appearances when he approached me on the quay,
where I had just taken nourishment from a workingman.

This Viktor who stepped out of the shadows in
this fifth decade of the nineteenth century was a man, not the boy
I had last seen, but I knew at once who he was. Imagine my surprise
and—yes, I will admit it—
joy
when first I saw him. And then
imagine my further shock and delight when I recognized almost right
away that he was just as I, in ways I could never have imagined or
hoped for. Spying the crumpled form above which I crouched, his
lips drew back instinctively to reveal tapered fangs. My brother—a
child of the night, a vampire! How I marveled at his conversion,
all these years imaging him forever gone.

He made no move to join me at my feast.

Our reunion was short-lived. Viktor greeted
me by my name, one I hardly recognized. In truth, I would not have,
were it not Viktor extending the salutation. His tone somber, he
declared outright his opprobrium at my use of Leonid’s name. He
knew I used our heroic brother’s name…

I
had
heard
of
a
boy
who
did
not
age
.

Yes, he had heard of me, and come to see
firsthand if there was any truth to the rumors, if it were truly I.
Seeing him there, near the water, brought back a flurry of memories
thought lost. Our frolics in the river near our own boyhood. Our
village and the characters that inhabited it—from the gypsy Maleva
with her dog to that treacherous Jew Feigel and his porcine
offspring. I thought to ask him of our sister, Sasha, but held my
tongue. Apparently Viktor shared none of my nostalgia.

There
are
others
who
come
after
me
.
Others
, he
warned,
who
have
also
heard
. He had
come, he told me, to warn me of these others. Those who, even now,
searched me out, riding on Petersburg. Viktor told me he himself
planned to depart at once, having now accomplished his task.
Rubbish
, I told him, he must join me at my home, as my
honored guest, to sit once again with Vinci as we had that night so
many years before. My brother declined my invitation, the
weightiest gravitas to his manner, his mien straightforward, even
severe.

I offered him the body at my feet and he
glanced upon it with despisement, fobbing me off with the excuse
that he had previously fed. A brother once—but no, now so much
more—he was as a stranger to me. Again he urged me to leave, and
then he himself was gone, turning his back to me without adieu and
walking away without a sound. Only I remained, with the stiffening
corpse of my workingman, with a thousand queries.

The following night, Elizaveta and I moved to
cement our lives together. She willingly brought her children to me
on the banks of the Neva. They resembled her, but only as
counterfeits to the actual treasure. The real beauty was mine
alone.

I took the oldest one first, while Elizaveta
restrained the remaining two. She held them fast, spectators to a
fate visited upon them next. True love knows no sin. Such was her
love for me that she encouraged me to drain them. No doubt my
manner exacted terror from the children: I grunted and snarled as I
fed—the blood spraying from their bodies in my frenzy—carried away
with the knowledge that this was one last obstacle to our
future.

They were strangers to their mother as I bled
them out, one by one, Elizaveta ignoring their desperate pleas. And
oh, their blood was sweet,
so
sweet, tasting more like their
mother’s than the grandmother’s had. When it was over, she came
into my arms. Whatever love she bore them paled in comparison to
the rapture we found in each other’s arms. Now eight months
pregnant, I allowed her to mount me amid their lifeless forms, the
two of us smeared with their fluids. Afterwards we disposed of the
bodies in the Neva.

Anon, I returned her to her grandmother’s
house, her husband fast asleep. Thus it was that our plans would
have born fruition, our two lives lived as one. Our bliss assured,
we would have been complete. If not for one.

“And?” Boone asked after some moments had
passed.

“And what?”

“Come on. What happened next?”

“So
now
you listen. Yet it is I who
weary of the tale.”

“Look, man. You can’t do that.”

“Do what exactly?”

“Leave your audience hanging like that. Kind
of bullshit story-telling is that?”

“Some stories, you shall learn, Boone, are
still being written. The d’enouement to my own sad tale shall be
related at some other juncture in time.”

Boone looked at the old vampire, wanting to
tell him again that was some bullshit there, but not wanting to
give him the satisfaction.

Son of a bitch.

“Here, hold this here,” Bianchi said to Jimmy
Scal, the compression bandage on his knee, his inflated elbow
pressed to the gauze pads he had resting in it. “You hold it here
while I tighten it.”

“
Che
cazzo
stai
dicendo
?” The Scal in his gold-framed sunglasses asking him
what the hell he wanted.

They were sitting around a table playing
cards, Dickie and Carlucci and the boys, when Werner walked up to
them, stood there with his arms crossed over his chest, waiting
until Carlucci looked at him and said, “What d’ya want?”

“There’s somebody wants to talk to you.” The
screw addressed Dickie directly, his words making Dickie think back
to what Renfeld said to him on line the other day.
The
Master
wants
to
see
you
.

Carlucci about to answer for him, Dickie
shaking his head, “Cheeks,” he had it. “Tell him he wants to talk,”
saying it pleasantly to the guard, “tell him come by and say hello.
Like you’re doin’.”

“It’s not going to work that way.”

“’S matta’ wit’ you?” Carlucci’s face
reddening. “You heard him?”